Ukraine

biochem wrote:At the time of this quote the USA was a 3rd world country. As the single most powerful 1st world nation on the entire planet, I'm unsure if we CAN withdraw. Sure we could try, but I"m not sure it will be successful. However, we certainly should be a lot more careful and selective.

Europe can defend itself for example. It is no longer a collection of shattered economies and destroyed cities that it was post WWII. They don't want our military there and there really is no good reason why we should be there beyond a staging base or two necessary for middle east actions (which we should be more selective about but I don't see that we can escape entirely).

namelessfly wrote:Once again confirming that pointy headed liberals are far to dedicated to their ideology to evaluate individual candidates and individual policies on their individual merits rather than on whom they can be identified with.

It was Turkey and Ted Kennedy who ensured that the insurgency would evolve in Iraq and Obama who snatched defeat from the jaws of Bush's hard-fought victory.

I now favor neo-isolationism because such partisan insanity makes any other policy insanely dangerous.

Just one more example of why the US should witdraw from NATO.

The US should not intervene even if Putin reenacts Stalin's terror famines of the 1930s that killed tens of millions of people.

The US could withdraw from it's alliances while remaining involved economically and diplomatically.

However; US energy production is still expanding.

They can not afford to increase their military spending to compensate for a US absence because their spending on nationalized healthcare and other "entitlements" is so high.

Russia is undergoing a demographic implosion

Turkey has been screwing the US to please Russia and also advance the dream of a resurgent Caliphate.

Eventually, Russia will go after Turkey if it is not under US protection. It will not last long.

Tenshinai wrote:

namelessfly wrote:Eventually, Russia will go after Turkey if it is not under US protection. It will not last long.

Delusional much?

kiddmeier wrote:Hello there, Tenshinai. Missed exchanging thoughts a lot these past months. I see you keep in shape.
About Turkey, I think nameless is somewhat right, on a very deep level, even if not for the reasons he thinks he is, and certainly not the way he thinks he is.
You as a Swede familiar with history must know Russia's history better than most. The russian empire's desire to possess or at least controll the Marmara straits is at least 300 years old - the minimum in the form of controlling the access through the Bosforus of potential enemy ships is an obvious strategic need. But then again it has always beed oposed /often forcefully/ by the french and the english, espesially by the latter and especially after the digging of the Suez cannal. So one has to have in mind that the possibility of taking possesion or applying a more serious level of control over the straits will always be present in the mind of any russian statesman deserving of the name - as any other possibility of strenghtening his/her own country's stretegic situation.

kiddmeier wrote:The only way this may happen is if Turkey goes down in a severe crisis and threatens to implode - which, even if not entirely impossible is not gonna happen any time soon, if at all.

kiddmeier wrote:Now the potential loss of its most important Black sea naval harbor is an entirely different bag of cats. Even excluding for the purpose of this particular argument all other reasons Russia has for intervening in Ukraine, Sevastopol in and of itself is a sufficient enough argument - a vital strategic need in very close proximity to its own borders. Russia cannot afford to lose the harbor and equally cannot afford it to be in possesion of a potentially hostile state. Not gonna happen. They lost Odessa already.

kiddmeier wrote:Russia has been pushed around on the international stage way too much in the last two decades.

kiddmeier wrote:The thing with russians one has to bear in mind is - they do not brake when pushed, they will bend further and further, until you reach a certain point and they snap back with force. Now that reverse movement may brake them, but even if so they will take as many of the pushers with them as they can, and there will be no such thing as innocent bystanders.

kiddmeier wrote:Me, I live on the other side of the Black sea from them and I really, really do not want to find myself under that back snap.

kiddmeier wrote:I see you keep in shape.

RandomGraysuit wrote:I was there in 2003-2004. Reconstruction projects started as soon as we had semi-permanent bases. The biggest obstacle was the tribal Arabic mindset of doing business, not money. It was all well and good to say you'd pay a million dollars in cold, hard American cash to build a water treatment facility or $10k for a school; if there weren't any locals capable of completing the project, or accepting the project without trying to embezzle 80% of the money, it wasn't going to get done.

What we needed was more than a battalion of troops to deal with an entire city. We needed to keep everybody in the initial push, plus everybody who followed them in summer/fall, PLUS everybody who reinforced in early 2004. We didn't need one more division in-country, we needed five or ten more.

If the United States didn't have enough troops (again, not one more division) to invade and secure the country in March of 2003, then either it shouldn't have invaded in March 2003, or it should have been scrambling to get more troops in 2001-2002, while the material build-up was going on in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and our civilian leadership knew it wanted to invade. Either one points to a dramatic failure of strategic leadership at a policy-making (civilian) level.

When the military leader of your army says "We don't have the troops to pull this off," you don't ignore him and go ahead anyway. You assume the guy with 40 years experience has a little bit of a clue what he's doing, and you figure out what you need to do. Maybe that's putting everything you've got except the 18th Airborne Corps into Iraq for the next five years with WW II style deployments instead of trying for one year Vietnam style rotations. Maybe that's going in front of the nation and saying, "Because of Bill Clinton's drawdown, we need more soldiers to pull this off. Congress, you need to authorize 150,000 more soldiers *right now* because we swear that Saddam Hussein has WMDs and can hit Washington DC with them this instant, cross our hearts."

When the American leadership attempted to reconstitute the Iraqi Army (which didn't start until around November of 2003), the assumption was that soldiers were soldiers anywhere you go. American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, same thing, and they're capable of the same tasks. Anyone who paid attention to various Israeli/Arabic conflicts should be aware that's not true. Either the American strategic leadership was unaware, ignoring those lessons, or inept. I don't know which is the case. Culturally, Arabic armies are similar to a late feudal European army, which is one reason they're so ineffective by comparison. If you tell an Arabic army to do something difficult, dangerous and/or uncomfortable, you're going to see losses every time you don't keep a guard to watch the inside of the camp.

The Iraqi Army was disbanded by Paul Bremer in May 2003, well before these reconstitution attempts. Bremer stated it was to reinforce the idea that the old regime was gone and not coming back. You're correct that Iraqi military units were useless in April 2003. The same was true in 2004, 2005, all the way up to 2014. Outside of portions of the Republican Guard, the concept of a professional military never truly existed in Iraq. Why the units that were underfed, undersupplied and unable to even care for themselves in January 1991 and March 2003 would suddenly become effective because Americans were giving orders is a mystery.

This was his second order, the first being the forcible disbanding of the Baathist administration and forbidding anyone with Baath affiliation from holding office. The British were still trying to bring the remnants of the Republican Guard they'd fought in Basra into the fold when Bremer cut their legs out from under them. The idea that those two orders support the concept of using existing Iraqi organizational structures is ludicrous. Being a Baathist in Iraq is like being a Communist in China, or a Democrat/Republican in the United States. If you want to have any decent civil service job, you join up. Paul Bremer wanted to rebuild everything from the ground up, without using anyone in the old regime. The problem is, you can't run a government without having a single person with civil service experience in it.

By the time the Americans had reached Baghdad in April, the only opposition to taking the airport came from Fedayeen fanatics in pickup trucks trying to charge tanks. One armored brigade with infantry support tried to hunker down in the city itself and destroy the Americans from hull-down positions and was wiped out for their troubles.

The vast majority of the Iraqi Army wasn't coming out to fight, risk death against a vastly superior enemy, and be taken prisoner if they were very lucky. Telling them to report to their barracks, sit their butts down and get fed on a regular basis would still have been possible in April/May, but the humanitarian supplies to do that didn't exist. Until well over a year later, even sufficient translation resources didn't exist.

The supposed flex capacity in Iraqi oil production that would pay for the war didn't exist either. I walked through a pumping station that was allegedly going to push over a hundred thousand barrels a day of crude. It hadn't worked for 20 years and the pipeline itself was rusted through in places.

Your comment on Al Sadr is a complete red herring. Even if there had been a million U.S. soldiers in Iraq at that time, it would have changed nothing. American military forces weren't allowed into holy sites like mosques without express clearance from senior leadership, unless they were being shot at from inside at that very moment. It took about a week for the Iraqis to figure that one out.

The American civilian leadership made the decision to conduct a short, victorious war on the cheap. The Americans would be welcomed as liberators, so there was no need to worry about controlling the country. The Iraqi oil infrastructure would pay for it. The Iraqis would spontaneously create a new government in cooperation with the CPA. We'd be gone in six months. Blaming Ted Kennedy or Turkey is like blaming Admiral Filareta for losing the second Battle of Manticore.

namelessfly wrote:You need to acquire more knowledge of military history.

Of course the US did not invade with enough troops to achieve the 50:1 ratio needed to cope with an insurgency.

The US simply did not have enough troops.

The original plan was to employ the Iraqi army and police forces in the occupation to achieve the 50:1 ratio.

The original plan was to prevent an insurgency from evolving by keeping the Iraqi economy, meaning oil production, intact.

The original battle plan was to bring the 3rd ID in from Turkey simultaneously with the invasion from the South. The Turkish government had agreed to this months prior but reneged when the parliament demanded that the US should have to pay $100 billion + for the privilege. The larger number of troops combined with the geographical position would have enabled the US to compel Iraqi divisions to surrender rather disperse. Keep in mind that the US invasion force in the south included only one Army Division and one Marine Corp division backed up by a British brigade. When Turkey reneged on allowing the third ID to deploy at the last moment (the ships with the heavy equipment were already waiting to dock), the US could either cancel the invasion or proceed while the 3rd ID was in transit to deploy from the South.

Since the third ID was unavailable, Iraqi army units were allowed to disperse rather than being compelled to surrender (really difficult to compel surrender when each US Division was engaging and defeating two Iraqi divisions in multiple, successive engagements. The fact that US attack helicopters had been mission killed or neutralized because US "allies" had provided Night Vision equipment to Iraq did not help). Attempts were made to reconstitute Iraqi units and employ them in the occupation but they were not successful. (imagine the insurgency that might have developed from the US Civil War if General Robert E Lee had not been compelled to surrender at Appomatix.). When Iraqi army units persisted in being worse than useless, Bremmer disbanded them. (I would have kept them on the payroll but confined to barracks for precisely the reasons you cite).

Given this evolving FUBAR resulting from Turkey reneging on a commitment, the fallback position was to stabilize the Iraqi economy and pacify the population by injecting cash. The Iraq reconstruction fund was the mechanism. While any infrastructure built would be nice, the real purpose was to keep young Iraqi men employed so that they would not be willing to be suicide bombers for $500. Ted Kennedy understood this yet he insisted on inserting a provision in the reconstruction fund legislation mandating peace time procurement rules. This ensured that there would be about a one year delay in the funds being employed so the insurgency would have plenty of time to develop. Where the Hell were Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald when we really needed them?

One other result of the paucity of troops imposed by Turkey was the inability to provide security for critical Iraqi leaders. The most important of these was a very prominent, moderate, Shiit cleric who preached reconciliation. During the early stages of the invasion, he was knifed to
death in his own mosque by a subordinate cleric Muktada Al Sadir who incited the Shiit insurgency.

For someone who lectures about military history, you are profoundly ignorant of the pertinent details.

kiddmeier wrote:Hello there, Tenshinai. Missed exchanging thoughts a lot these past months. I see you keep in shape.
About Turkey, I think nameless is somewhat right, on a very deep level, even if not for the reasons he thinks he is, and certainly not the way he thinks he is.
You as a Swede familiar with history must know Russia's history better than most. The russian empire's desire to possess or at least controll the Marmara straits is at least 300 years old - the minimum in the form of controlling the access through the Bosforus of potential enemy ships is an obvious strategic need. But then again it has always beed oposed /often forcefully/ by the french and the english, espesially by the latter and especially after the digging of the Suez cannal. So one has to have in mind that the possibility of taking possesion or applying a more serious level of control over the straits will always be present in the mind of any russian statesman deserving of the name - as any other possibility of strenghtening his/her own country's stretegic situation.

kiddmeier wrote:The only way this may happen is if Turkey goes down in a severe crisis and threatens to implode - which, even if not entirely impossible is not gonna happen any time soon, if at all.

kiddmeier wrote:Now the potential loss of its most important Black sea naval harbor is an entirely different bag of cats. Even excluding for the purpose of this particular argument all other reasons Russia has for intervening in Ukraine, Sevastopol in and of itself is a sufficient enough argument - a vital strategic need in very close proximity to its own borders. Russia cannot afford to lose the harbor and equally cannot afford it to be in possesion of a potentially hostile state. Not gonna happen. They lost Odessa already.

kiddmeier wrote:Russia has been pushed around on the international stage way too much in the last two decades.

kiddmeier wrote:The thing with russians one has to bear in mind is - they do not brake when pushed, they will bend further and further, until you reach a certain point and they snap back with force. Now that reverse movement may brake them, but even if so they will take as many of the pushers with them as they can, and there will be no such thing as innocent bystanders.

kiddmeier wrote:Me, I live on the other side of the Black sea from them and I really, really do not want to find myself under that back snap.

kiddmeier wrote:I see you keep in shape.

I was there in 2003-2004. Reconstruction projects started as soon as we had semi-permanent bases. The biggest obstacle was the tribal Arabic mindset of doing business, not money. It was all well and good to say you'd pay a million dollars in cold, hard American cash to build a water treatment facility or $10k for a school; if there weren't any locals capable of completing the project, or accepting the project without trying to embezzle 80% of the money, it wasn't going to get done.

What we needed was more than a battalion of troops to deal with an entire city. We needed to keep everybody in the initial push, plus everybody who followed them in summer/fall, PLUS everybody who reinforced in early 2004. We didn't need one more division in-country, we needed five or ten more.

If the United States didn't have enough troops (again, not one more division) to invade and secure the country in March of 2003, then either it shouldn't have invaded in March 2003, or it should have been scrambling to get more troops in 2001-2002, while the material build-up was going on in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and our civilian leadership knew it wanted to invade. Either one points to a dramatic failure of strategic leadership at a policy-making (civilian) level.

When the military leader of your army says "We don't have the troops to pull this off," you don't ignore him and go ahead anyway. You assume the guy with 40 years experience has a little bit of a clue what he's doing, and you figure out what you need to do. Maybe that's putting everything you've got except the 18th Airborne Corps into Iraq for the next five years with WW II style deployments instead of trying for one year Vietnam style rotations. Maybe that's going in front of the nation and saying, "Because of Bill Clinton's drawdown, we need more soldiers to pull this off. Congress, you need to authorize 150,000 more soldiers *right now* because we swear that Saddam Hussein has WMDs and can hit Washington DC with them this instant, cross our hearts."

When the American leadership attempted to reconstitute the Iraqi Army (which didn't start until around November of 2003), the assumption was that soldiers were soldiers anywhere you go. American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, same thing, and they're capable of the same tasks. Anyone who paid attention to various Israeli/Arabic conflicts should be aware that's not true. Either the American strategic leadership was unaware, ignoring those lessons, or inept. I don't know which is the case. Culturally, Arabic armies are similar to a late feudal European army, which is one reason they're so ineffective by comparison. If you tell an Arabic army to do something difficult, dangerous and/or uncomfortable, you're going to see losses every time you don't keep a guard to watch the inside of the camp.

The Iraqi Army was disbanded by Paul Bremer in May 2003, well before these reconstitution attempts. Bremer stated it was to reinforce the idea that the old regime was gone and not coming back. You're correct that Iraqi military units were useless in April 2003. The same was true in 2004, 2005, all the way up to 2014. Outside of portions of the Republican Guard, the concept of a professional military never truly existed in Iraq. Why the units that were underfed, undersupplied and unable to even care for themselves in January 1991 and March 2003 would suddenly become effective because Americans were giving orders is a mystery.

This was his second order, the first being the forcible disbanding of the Baathist administration and forbidding anyone with Baath affiliation from holding office. The British were still trying to bring the remnants of the Republican Guard they'd fought in Basra into the fold when Bremer cut their legs out from under them. The idea that those two orders support the concept of using existing Iraqi organizational structures is ludicrous. Being a Baathist in Iraq is like being a Communist in China, or a Democrat/Republican in the United States. If you want to have any decent civil service job, you join up. Paul Bremer wanted to rebuild everything from the ground up, without using anyone in the old regime. The problem is, you can't run a government without having a single person with civil service experience in it.

By the time the Americans had reached Baghdad in April, the only opposition to taking the airport came from Fedayeen fanatics in pickup trucks trying to charge tanks. One armored brigade with infantry support tried to hunker down in the city itself and destroy the Americans from hull-down positions and was wiped out for their troubles.

The vast majority of the Iraqi Army wasn't coming out to fight, risk death against a vastly superior enemy, and be taken prisoner if they were very lucky. Telling them to report to their barracks, sit their butts down and get fed on a regular basis would still have been possible in April/May, but the humanitarian supplies to do that didn't exist. Until well over a year later, even sufficient translation resources didn't exist.

The supposed flex capacity in Iraqi oil production that would pay for the war didn't exist either. I walked through a pumping station that was allegedly going to push over a hundred thousand barrels a day of crude. It hadn't worked for 20 years and the pipeline itself was rusted through in places.

Your comment on Al Sadr is a complete red herring. Even if there had been a million U.S. soldiers in Iraq at that time, it would have changed nothing. American military forces weren't allowed into holy sites like mosques without express clearance from senior leadership, unless they were being shot at from inside at that very moment. It took about a week for the Iraqis to figure that one out.

The American civilian leadership made the decision to conduct a short, victorious war on the cheap. The Americans would be welcomed as liberators, so there was no need to worry about controlling the country. The Iraqi oil infrastructure would pay for it. The Iraqis would spontaneously create a new government in cooperation with the CPA. We'd be gone in six months. Blaming Ted Kennedy or Turkey is like blaming Admiral Filareta for losing the second Battle of Manticore.